DARPA Subterranean Challenge Tunnel Circuit 2019

Our group participated in the Subterranean Challenge (SubT) competition organized by the American research agency DARPA. In the first round of the competition, the task was to search a large coal mine using only robots. The goal was to find several specific items, like mobile phones, fire extinguishers, tools, or mannequins representing survivors of the catastrophe, and then subsequently the robots had to report the object position with a precision tolerance of 5 meters, many kilometers underground. The problems we faced were the limited communication underground, the localization of the robots, autonomous navigation, and the searching and identification of the objects.

We finished in 3rd place overall with 10 points behind a team which had been training in the very same mines for several years prior (Explorer, 25 points) and behind giants such as NASA(JPL), MIT, Caltech, and KAIST (CoSTAR, 11 points). However, we were the best self-funded team which had paid for their whole participation in the competition themselves. The second self-funded team, NCTU, ended up at the 7th place with 2 points.